Imagine being a 20-year-old kid who
plays any college sport. They’re one of the best players on the team, which is
derived from practice
Imagine two people playing the same
sport, and they’re the same age. Both practice equally as hard, and score as
many points and are key assets to their teams’ development. Without them, the
team would fall apart and the chance of getting to the playoffs was slim to
none. Both players are lauded amongst their peers and fans adore them. Both of
them bounce the ball the same way, or swing the bat just as hard or skate just
as fast.
But there’s one difference, one of them
gets paid millions of dollars a year, through a sporting contract as well as
countless endorsements from some of the biggest companies in the world. The other
lives in a dorm with friends, and has to attend classes along with the kids who
attend the university and don’t have to wake up at 5a.m. every day to practice,
and are forced to write research papers while traveling across the country with
there teammates.
Perhaps you see it differently.
A underdeveloped, immature teenager who
thinks she/he is on top of the world, without a care. School? It means nothing
to them, aside from a bridge that must be crossed before they can get into the
league. Red Shirting has never crossed their mind, and hopes to make their
freshmen season their very best. After all, they’ll be in the pros before they
can even drink at the clubs where they plan to spend loads of money. Professors
are mad fans, who see that the players arrive late, and instead of recognizing
that fact, they congratulate them on their most recent game and comment on the
game winner that they were responsible for. After the professor reenacts the
play, the student athlete is invited to take a seat. Any student who walks in
afterwards gets yelled at in front of the class though. The athletes already attend
top notch universities and colleges and don’t pay for a thing. A free
education, room and board, and a meal plan are all taken care off.
Neither one of these views are wrong nor
right, and the views of the student body as well as the media critique this.
“Why should they get paid to go here?
Just because he can through a ball in a hoop, or hit a ball with a piece of
wood doesn’t mean anything. We should all care about our education first,
seriously. I think athletics at St. Johns are awesome and are a great way for
school spirit but sometimes people really do just go overboard. And it needs to
stop. Isn’t it enough that they literally get treated like kings and queens
around campus, they pay for nothing,” said John Gross, a junior at St. John’s.
Other students are just as irate.
“Show me one student athlete crying
about having a partial scholarship for their insignificant major and I can show
you a ton more of radiology kids who have a higher tuition and no scholarship,
but work twice as hard,” Chloe Vincent, a sophomore at St. John’s.
Some of these players do deserve to be
paid, actually all of them do. If you look at it from the point that they put
their bodies in harm’s way for a sport and aren’t really being awarded
monetarily, it’s pretty messed up. Even though our school doesn’t have
football, that’s the sport that definitely needs to be paid, between playing in
the heat with all that gear, or constantly being tackled to the ground by a guy
who weighs twice as much as you. Look at Johnny Manziel, and you’re telling me
he shouldn’t get paid,” said Matthew Moore, a Baruch Senior.
Manziel is a great example of this
dichotomy, The Texas A&M quarter may have red shirted freshman year, but he
broke out during the sophomore year by breaking several NCAA Division 1 records.
He broke numerous NCAA Division I FBS and SEC records,
which include becoming the first freshman and fifth player in NCAA history to
pass for 3,000 yards and rush for 1,000 yards in a season. At the end of the
regular season, he became the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy, Manning Award, and the Davey O'Brien National Quarterback
Award. Manziel capitalized on his redshirt freshman season by leading Texas A&M to a 41–13 victory over Oklahoma in the 2013 Cotton Bowl Classic.
Other
accolades include 2012 Sporting News College Football Player of the Year, 2012
SEC Offensive Player of the Year, 2012 SEC Freshman of the Year, 2012 All-SEC
First-Team Quarterback
All of these accolades
show that Manziel is a great football player, and should be rewarded is some
way, shape, or form. But with these gifts come a few curses, which Manziel
seems to continuously attract.
On June 29, 2012,
before he was chosen as Texas A&M's starting quarterback and before his
first college game, Manziel was arrested and charged with three
misdemeanors—disorderly conduct, failure to identify, and possession of a
fictitious driver's license. These charges stemmed from a late-night fight in College Station, Texas.
Many may have thought
that he’d learned his lesson after this, after he stated that he “had to make a
lot of changes in life.” But this didn’t last long as troubles arose again
during the 2013 off season.
During the 2013
offseason, Manziel drew significant media attention over his behavior off the
field. Notable incidents include his early departure from the Manning Passing
Academy after allegedly
oversleeping, tweeting that he
"can't wait to leave College Station" after receiving a parking
ticket, and getting kicked out of a University of Texas fraternity party. An ESPN The Magazine article revealed his parents' concerns
about his dealings with his newfound stardom.
On August 4, 2013, ESPN reported
that the NCAA was investigating whether Manziel
accepted payments from autographs that he had signed in January 2013. The NCAA
did not find any evidence that Manziel accepted money for the autographs, but
reached an agreement with Texas A&M to suspend him for the first half of
the season opener against Rice
University, due to an "inadvertent violation" of NCAA rules.
The very issue of NCAA athletes getting
paid was the main focus of Manziel’s article in TIME magazine this past
September. The article reveals that paying athletes can be done, and they
amounts that some schools can afford to pay are astonishing.
Sean Gregory who wrote the article,
stated that each Aggie player would get $225,000 a year if the NCAA operated
under the NFL’s revenue-sharing model, and a compromise is even suggested.
All
athletes would be eligible for payments in addition to any scholarship. But
most schools would pay only football and men’s basketball players, since those
sports produce the bulk of the revenue. An SEC school like Alabama could pay 50
of its players up to a limit of $30,000 a year. The more successful players
would get near the maximum while others would get less.
But
the total amount any school could pay out would be capped at $1.5 million.
Experts think this is a fair amount given the millions in revenue that sports
and TV deals amount to. Athletes could be allowed to make money in other ways,
such as the right to secure sponsorships even be part of commercials.
Smaller
offenses have even been subjected to scrutiny, such as the Arian Foster
situation that arose while he was a player at Tennessee, after his coach bought
several players on the team food.
Foster
was quoted saying "Then I walk back, and reality sets in. I go to my dorm
room, open my fridge, and there's nothing in my fridge. Hold up, man. What just
happened? Why don't I have anything to show for what I just did? There was a
point where we had no food, no money, so I called my coach and I said, 'Coach,
we don't have no food. We don't have no money. We're hungry. Either you give us
some food, or I'm gonna go do something stupid.' He came down and he brought
like 50 tacos for like four or five of us.”
Seeing it
from this angle it is hard not to feel some sort of compassion for the position
the players are in. Players offer a healthy argument as to why the deserve to
get paid
"I'm
a firm believer that an employee should get paid for his work," Foster
added. "And, 100 percent, I see student athletes as employees. Hiding from
it is just cowardly."
As opinions continue to
flare the debate, the NCAA refuses to budge on the issue, as that would
literally take money out of their pocket.
